Inseparable but Separated
by Lea Benoit
Summary: Clint is pretty damn sure that the world stops when Natasha dies. That is, of course, until he reads her letters.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** Mental's second half will be ready soon. As soon as school gives me some free time, I promise. :

This is half the story, so do leave me some reviews and let me know if you want it finished! It's really basic, and I hope you're in the mood for angst. Do go and read Mental, too. I'd appreciate it.

* * *

Clint is pretty damn sure that the world stops when Natasha dies.

They tell him over the phone. It was a struggle, Agent Barton, and she fought to the last. She was strong and she didn't want to leave. We're sorry for your loss, Agent Barton, we know how close you were. We're going to be making arrangements for her. What would she have wanted, Barton? Where should she want to go?

The first thing he thinks is that he knows she'd have wanted to see London – to be there in more than simply photographs, to have gone to the libraries. He knows that she would have gone to steal candy from a shop – just for the rush of being a child, being out of pocket money, running in and out to sate the craving for adrenaline. He knows she'd always wanted to see the circus with him. He knows, he knows, he knows–

He knows that she'd have wanted _more_. Anything but the walls of the white room she'd been locked in, caged to her end. They had always wanted her collared, always wanted her in their sight, and even in her weakest hour, they had treated her as a simple animal. And he knows that the world still takes a long breath and stops when she passes. Because Natasha had always been there for them. She had always been reliable.

He rattles off the quickest answer he knows, and he knows they'll follow his instructions to a T for Fury's favourite. But he isn't at her funeral. He isn't at the cremation, isn't at the memorial service. Instead, he watches through a video feed, with the lag setting him back seconds after the others. He is alone in his cot, holding the phone as he watches the little coffin slide into the fire. It becomes too much. He hangs up.

After all, he is still deployed in Germany for months more. She would ask him to focus on his work.

* * *

_Agent Natalia "Natasha Romanoff" Alianovna Romanova  
died 29th September 2016 in the care of S.H.I.E.L.D.._

Two weeks after her death, there is a letter and a card.

The first is a declaration of her death, clean and simple, printed on a small card. It stings, really, knowing that was what she'd been to them. An employee, and yet they'd been her only semblance of family. He reads her name carefully, his eyes running over it over and over again. For once, he notes, they've printed a legal name. It looks strange, now. No one had ever addressed her by it. Not there.

Natalia. Natasha. Natalie Rushman. He wonders sometimes if she had ever liked the cover names. She never said – she was always a chameleon with her identity, always assuming the one that was required by her. Even he had required her to be 'Tasha', and he hadn't the slightest clue if she had enjoyed him or not.

Instead of a letter from the agency, however, he pulls out a thick stack of worn paper. Each sheet has been creased in more than one place, obviously read over and over by someone with careless fingers, or shaking so hard she could hardly have controlled the weight of the stationery. He is shaken, it is true – something from her. It is for him, his name written clearly at the top, her script so familiar and so deliberately shaped.

There is a story, he knows, behind this. There is a story behind the words spun under her fingers with the last her mind offered her. With every last piece of strength her body could offer, he sees at the end, where the words become shaky and the choices become flawed. Where she loses the English and forces herself to continue, almost insisting she will complete it. And he sees the final stroke of a pen through the sheet. Where she'd gone limp.

And he can picture it all. He can picture the way she speaks in her words, and he has never felt so lost – so he returns to the start. It begins with his name, and it ends with the words she'd never said to him. A whole cycle, he muses quietly. She had always... chosen his name as her way of saying it. Of not saying it.

It begins with 'Clint,' and immediately, she is there. She is holding him and she is speaking into his ear. Or she is sitting in her desk at the hospital, and he can't help but think she is still beautiful. She is alone, he knows, and she is lonely. But he will be with her, and she will never leave.

He knows that she had loved him. He knows that she would have wanted to leave with him. He knows that he would have let her.

He isn't there when she leaves him. And now it is not her who is alone.


	2. Chapter 2

He spends the next few days reading it over and over and over. He needs to resolve this. He says he will read it a last time, and he will burn it. He will remember her forever, and he will keep the end. Just the end. The only memory he really needs.

He looks at the letter again, and he can see every clue Natasha has given him.

He thinks Natasha is sure that he will see how her pencil hovers above the sheet, trembling.

Every little nuance. She has made an effort to leave them all, even though she would usually have just taken her phone for a text message. It will have been easier, with the shaking fingers, but she makes an effort to grip an instrument with long, pale fingers.

And then she touches the tip to the sheet.

_Clint–_

_You'd better get your ass home from Germany in one piece. Drug dealers are beneath you; don't want to drag yourself back with your tail between your legs. I won't forgive you. You'll come back and I'll get out of bed to make us coffee. Vodka optional._

He smiles – but Natasha had never been as funny as she'd have liked to be. Always, she had tried to keep up with him, drawling and saying the strangest things until he laughed along with her. But she had always been too serious, in private. He'd always confused her.

But now she is trying hard, he muses quietly. The text is written slowly, deliberately, controlling the tremble. It hurts, he muses, to see how she has worked for this, using the last of her breaths to create something vaguely perfect for him. For them.

There is a ramble that follows, about her days. About the hospital, about the idiots who come to visit her. About Pepper and Tony and Steve and Sharon and how they're ridiculous, how they are disgustingly affectionate and how she can't stand it. How they remind her–

–_that there's something ridiculously attractive about sentiment. _

_I remember that, Clint; I remember Rome. I remember waking up to you and I remember being naked and I remember flowers. I remember sentiments when you wrote a good-morning on a receipt and made me keep it. I remember. For fuck's sake, it's here. Someone's... brought it from my room, and... _

Then there is a pause, and she holds the tip of her pencil down with a tension he can read. It presses deep into the leaf she writes on, and he can't help but run his finger over it. What had she been thinking, then?

_There's no time, that's what they're saying. Maybe days, but they can't say, and they're telling me to write a will. It's like they think they can coax something out of me, but there's nothing I own. If anything, it's all yours, isn't it? That's what partners do, you said. That's... you said we weren't partners, didn't you? At some point. What was that? Were we in Atlanta? China? Where?_

_And... and I've been pushing and shoving but... when did you first say you loved me? _

Some part of him is breaking. This is Natasha at her worst, sounding younger than she has for years, and the form of her usual speech is breaking. She is growing desperate, and she is trying to focus on the issue – had she known right then that she was dying? Had she been afraid, locked in a room by herself, with nothing but a pencil and a letter to a man who wasn't there for her?

There is a struggle in the next few minutes, and the light, faint stain of blood. A cough, he reads – because he had known about her condition. Before he'd left, he'd been with her, even, and she had been coughing so often. And then she is writing again, pressing on, but the script is lighter now.

_There her is heart... hurting–_

Clint doesn't understand it, not really. It tells of a headache, of the pain it must be taking her to translate now, and that he understands. Her head is hurting, maybe. She must have been dying right then, already running out of air, and she writes senselessly now, forcing whatever words will come out in English, and she is panting, but she–

_Clint, Clint, Clint, love–_

And then the script is in block, a careful space written between each letter, the only thing she can possibly manage as she is sucking in her last. She must be smiling, and he is smiling as he reads it. No, he isn't crying – there aren't tears on his cheeks, Tasha, what are you talking about? He wouldn't have cried. You wouldn't have wanted him to.

_I love you_

And then he is quiet. She is, too. She is somewhere he cannot touch, and yet the words on the page make him feel like there's otherwise. Like there is somewhere he can rest his hand against the glass and expect warmth as she presses her palm against his. In this world, she is smiling and he has never left her.

Now it is his turn, and he is to keep his promise.

There will come a time when he will come home to her, where the inseparable will link their hands and say vows. They will be complete. They will be together, where she is no longer in pain and where he does not watch her crumble. She is strong, and she is beautiful.

And neither will be alone.


End file.
